22 



DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



the idea. Going from here to JNIontana, and as I had the opportunity and 

 responsibilit}' of traveling over nearly all of that great state, it occurred 

 to me, I remember very well, during that winter, traveling from where the 

 college is located at Bozeman, from Helena to Great Falls, on up to the 

 Milk River Valley, where I could see great plains of prairie country ex- 

 tending for miles, grass and sod that was apparently yielding abundant 

 crops of pasture all through the year, and as I traveled from the Utah 

 countr}' to one very much more sparsely covered with grass, yielding crops 

 of grain, that the opportunities for the Montana farmer were none the less, 

 perhaps in some respects greater, from a dry farming standpoint than those 

 of his neighbor in Utah. And so, since that time, as the opportunity has 

 offered, as the occasion has arisen, I have urged, in season, and perhaps 

 some people who are interested more particularly in using the country as a 

 grazing country might say, out of season, the importance of taking up and 

 studying this question of dry farming. Already a good deal has been done 

 in that regard in Montana. In the Gallatin Valley, in which valley, by the 

 way, the people will swear by the irrigated crops that they grow, a great 

 deal has been done by dry farming. Probably 1000 acres of that country, 

 in the foothills of the mountains, above the irrigation ditches is farmed, 

 and the yield they get is very good indeed, although the months of moisture 

 consumption are not what we would in anywise call ideal. So in regard to 

 other parts of the state. There were a few places up around the Great Falls, 

 up in the foothills of the Highwood Mountains, in the mountains sur- 

 rounded by the little flats they are beginning to understand quite rapidly 

 the probabilities of dry land farming. 



Another thought that has impressed itself upon my mind, urging the 

 necessity of study along this line, has been that we have a large number of 

 settlers coming into Montana within the past two or three years who are 

 taking up this dry land; not, perhaps, on account of the investigation and 

 advertising we have done, but rather 'because of the general influence, or 

 general advertising that has been going on all over the country. The people 

 are coming. It has impressed itself upon my mind that if we are going to 

 help these people to make the best for themselves and make a success out 

 of that dry farming work, they are going to need a lot of help. They 

 should be able to get the information that is going to tell them what kind 

 of crop to grow, how to cultivate their soil, how to seed their crops, how to 

 sow and till their land so as to get the maximum crop and take it put of 

 the element of chance as far as possible, and place their probabilities upon 

 science, which makes it more probable, the larger probabilities that they 

 are going to get a successful return from their endeavors on that dry land. 

 We have, during the past few years, taken up this study of dry land crop- 

 ping in something like six or seven parts of the state. We are trying to 

 find out two or three things, namely: In the first place the months of 

 cultivation which are going to give the maximum crop, or, in other words, 

 store the largest amount of water in the soil for the crop. We talk about 

 dry land cropping, and yet we know that we cannot grow crops without 

 water; and so we must know how we are going to save all of the water 



